[Air-L] breaking news and fake news - the wash post's russian power grid hackers story

kalev leetaru kalev.leetaru5 at gmail.com
Sun Jan 1 11:48:42 PST 2017


I'm sure many of you saw the Washington Post's story on Friday that Russian
hackers had penetrated the US power grid through a utility in Vermont and
also the unraveling of that story over the following half day.

What is so fascinating about this case from a "fake news" perspective is
that it brings into sharp relief once again A) how the mainstream media
forms a trust echochamber in which once one outlet runs a story, everyone
follows without performing their own fact checking, B) the absolute trust
frequently placed in government sources as "truth", C) the lack of fact
checking even at tier one outlets like the Post and the lack of
transparency in those processes (while answering other questions, the Post
declined for a second time to comment in any way on how it fact checks
articles and the level of rigor it requires prior to publication), D) how
once an article is published, even if it is retracted or substantively
changed, how that is often not clearly communicated to readers.

I thought many of you would find of interest in particular the chronology
of edits to the Post page courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback
Machine and how it was almost a full day after the article had been
rewritten that the Post finally appended an editors note acknowledging the
wholesale changes - again points both to how newspapers now constantly
rewrite their online articles over the course of a day or more and the
immense power of the Archive in allowing us to trace those edits over time.

To me, perhaps the most interesting piece here from a "fake news"
perspective is how often "breaking news" becomes "fake news" as major
details change once more facts become available. Given that in this case
the Post was constantly rewriting the article over more than 12 hours after
publication, it also raises the question of how we leverage all of these
initiatives that look at news rewriting to help flag when articles are
retracted or heavily edited and communicate that back to the general public
- the tools are all there, but in terms of helping getting that back to the
public.



http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-news-and-how-the-washington-post-rewrote-its-story-on-russian-hacking-of-the-power-grid/


Kalev



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